1. Field of the Invention
The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for providing a cloud based password manager that automatically logs in users from any computer.
2. Background and Related Art
With the increasing amount of online interaction available today, a typical individual must maintain login credentials for a large number of websites. It is generally recommended that an individual maintain strong credentials especially to websites that provide access to sensitive data. However, it is difficult to remember each set of login credentials for every site with which the individual has an account.
To address this difficulty, many individuals use password managers. A password manager is a tool that stores a user's login credentials for various websites, and can generally be used to automatically populate the login fields of a website with the appropriate set of credentials.
Many current password managers use some type of plug-in or other module installed locally on the user's computer to perform these functions. These password managers often maintain a cloud based repository for storing a master copy of a user's credentials. However, to use such password managers to automatically populate the login fields of a website being accessed on a local computer, the plug-in must be installed on the local computer.
For example, LastPass, a currently popular password manager, employs a browser plug-in. The browser plug-in detects when a user has navigated to a website for which LastPass stores the user's credentials, and can automatically populate the website's login fields with the user's credentials. After auto-populating the login credentials, LastPass can also cause the credentials to be submitted (e.g. by causing the submission of the HTTP POST request that is invoked when the submit button is clicked) to the website to cause the user to be automatically logged in to the website.
LastPass maintains a cloud based repository where each user's login credentials are stored and can be accessed from any computer. However, without installing the browser plug-in on a local computer, the automatic population of credentials and the automatic submission of login requests cannot be performed on the local computer.
Password managers like LastPass are effective when a user is using the same computer or computers where the plug-in has been installed. However, if the user is ever using a different computer on which the plug-in is not installed, the user cannot employ the password managers to automatically populate credentials or automatically log in. These password managers will allow the user to access the cloud based repository to view the credentials, but the user will have to enter the credentials and log in manually as when no password manager is used. Therefore, even though many of these password managers claim to provide access to login credentials from anywhere or any device, they do not provide the key benefit of automatic login from any device on which the plug-in has not been installed.
Accordingly, it would be an improvement in the art to augment or even replace current techniques with other techniques.